Many online businesses make recommendations of their products to online users in the hope that the recommendation recipients follow the recommendations. A recommendation is effective if the recommendation recipient (hereinafter also “recommendee”) acts on the recommendation. However, the more recommendations are sent to online recommendees, the less effective the recommendations may become. In other words, an increased volume of recommendations received by recommendees may cause the recommendees to become annoyed and ignore the recommendations.
Some online businesses have made attempts to create recommendations that are more effective by including social signals into the recommendations. A recommendation that includes social signals usually makes a reference to a member of the recommendee's social network in an attempt to make the recommendation seem more personal and, therefore, more acceptable to the recommendee.
In a traditional recommendation system, a content provider communicates a recommendation to a target user (also “recommendee”). The content provider directly delivers information about an item (e.g., product, article, service, etc.) to a recommendee via email or online notification streams (e.g., Facebook® Wall™). Any interaction by a member of the recommendee's social network with this item is primarily used as a social proof to enhance the credibility of the recommendation. For example, the content provider may utilize knowledge derived from a recommendee's social graph to indicate that a member of the recommendee's social graph has already used, interacted with, or liked an item of web-based content (also “item”). A “social graph” is a mechanism used by online social network services for defining and memorializing, in a digital format, a user's relationships with other people. Frequently, a social graph is a digital representation of real-world relationships. Social graphs may be digital representations of online communities to which a user belongs, often including the members of such communities (e.g., a family, a group of friends, alums of a university, employees of a company, members of a professional association, etc.)
As discussed above, some online businesses may include in a recommendation to the recommendee a reference to a member of the recommendee's social network in order to enhance the credibility of the recommendation. Such recommendations delivered by a content creator (e.g., an e-commerce site) directly to a target user are also known as “cold” recommendations due to their impersonal nature or unrelatable source. Accordingly, because the vast majority of such “cold” recommendations are likely to annoy the recipients and, as a result, be ignored, the conventional social signal recommendations are generally ineffective in accomplishing their purpose of engaging the recommendation recipient with the recommended item.